Shroud of London

Wonderfully malleable as a theatrical trope, the idea of fog has strong roots in literature and art as well, and Christine L. Corton explores this very fertile subject in London Fog: The Biography. She has researched deeply a subject that has been written about extensively since “fog” became an issue of note in the 17th century. The rising impact of the Industrial Revolution in the early 1800s, along with the explosive population growth of metropolitan London, made fog a fact of everyday life.

Coal fires were common and necessary. High in sulfur, they created a yellow fog that became increasingly thick and persistent as London became an economic hub in the 19th century. Responding to a crescendo of public concern, Parliament began to pass bills aimed at reducing smoke in the 1820s, but as Corton writes, “it was difficult to interfere with the right of the householder to use coal for heating and cooking, and there were no satisfactory alternative sources of energy.”

Because it was omnipresent and unavoidable, fog was continually written about—providing a descriptive record that evocatively delineated London fog’s “biography.” In 1853, one Londoner described it as “grey-yellow, of a deep orange.” By 1901, it had become “brown, sometimes almost black.” Corton, a scholar at Wolfson College, Cambridge, tracks the different appellations given London’s fog: In its innocent 18th-century youth, fog was described as a “mist.” By the mid-19th century its uglier character had emerged under the guise of a “pea-souper,” since that’s what its color resembled. Visiting London in 1849, Herman Melville wrote in his journal of “the oldfashioned pea soup London fog—of a gamboge [orange-yellow] color.” Newspaper accounts also described how the city’s population was “periodically submerged in a fog of the consistency of pea-soup.”

An inescapable presence, fog appeared as an active force in Victorian literature. Charles Dickens, Corton notes, used fog “as a metaphorical expression” of city life. In the mid-1820s setting of The Old Curiosity Shop, he portrayed London’s fog as a natural force of imagination; by the time he was writing Bleak House, he refashioned fog as a medium of menace and confusion:

Dickens’s change of attitude reflected the emerging idea, Corton suggests, that “Nature itself has been perverted.” Instead of soft white snow, Dickens writes of a “soft black drizzle.” As a natural force, the more menacing and dark fog of midcentury London also came to symbolize a threatening alternative to the social hierarchy that ruled civilized life: “It dissolved moral boundaries and replaced reassuring certainties with obscurity and doubt,” Corton writes, and allowed “the criminal, the deviant, and the transgressive to roam the streets unhindered and unobserved.” It also created, as Nathaniel Hawthorne would comment in 1857, a sense of anonymity: “It is really an ungladdened life, to wander through these huge, thronged ways . . . jostling against people who do not seem to be individuals, but all one mass.”

Mark Twain, on a lecture tour in 1873, tried to see the lighter side of the fog’s omnipresence. One night he told his audience, “Ladies and gentlemen, I hear you, and so I know that you are here—and I am here too, notwithstanding I am not visible.” Robert Louis Stevenson’s short novel The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde has been called “the greatest novel of London fog.” Although there is actually little fog in the novel, the medium creates an obsession with concealment that permeates the story. The world of Jekyll and Hyde is one of inversion, where daylight “consists of a marvelous number of degrees and hues of twilight.” Fog instills the air with a sense of secrecy through its “swirling” presence and weighty gloom. It was a terrifying world where women walked the streets and abandoned children huddled in doorways. It was a place, in the late 1880s, where Jack the Ripper roamed and slaughtered

with impunity.

In his fictional world, Arthur Conan Doyle certainly embraced fog’s possibilities to enhance the adventures of Sherlock Holmes. At one point, Holmes reflects on the opportunities fog offers London criminals:

Fog appears early in The Sign of Four: “It was a September evening and not yet seven o’clock. . . . The lamps were but misty splotches of diffused light which threw a feeble circular glimmer upon the slimy pavement.”

While writers and the press focused on the hidden menace of a fogbound world, artists were inspired by the impact nature’s atmospherics had on the idea of reality itself, and began painting a world that was expressively brooding, blurred, and moody.

James McNeill Whistler’s “Noc-turnes” are a prime example of how London’s fog was aestheticized. Whistler’s studio was on the banks of the Thames, and he looked out at the bustle of the river’s workaday activities near Battersea Bridge. In broad daylight, it was often a grimy and gritty view, but Corton describes how fog magically transformed the urban landscape for Whistler. The artist was transfixed by how fog morphed the ugliness into a “fairy-land” where “the warehouses are palaces in the night, and the whole city hangs in the heavens.” On the advice of his patron Frederick Leyland—the shipping magnate who would soon engage him to decorate what became the Peacock Room—Whistler decided to name his atmospheric paintings “Nocturnes.” His first such painting was the 1871 Nocturne: Blue and Silver—Chelsea, and his most provocative the Nocturne in Black and Gold: The Flaming Rocket (ca. 1875), which sparked a highly publicized legal battle with John Ruskin over the worthiness of the Nocturnes as “art.”

Claude Monet, one of the French artists who rejected the classicism of the French Academy in the 1860s, came to London and was similarly attracted by fog’s effect on light and form. According to Corton, Monet’s 1872 Impression, Sunrise led a critic to coin the word for the Impressionist movement itself. Monet often sketched the rapidly changing atmosphere in oil rather than graphite, returning to his studio in Giverny to complete his paintings. He wrote that “London is . . . harder to paint. The fog assumes all sorts of colors; there are black, brown, yellow, green, purple fogs. . . . My practiced eye has found that objects change in appearance in a London fog more and quicker than in any other atmosphere.” As Corton notes, one of Monet’s most remarkable fog paintings is Waterloo Bridge in Fog (1899-1901).

According to some estimates, fog covered the city on almost one day out of four in the 1880s. Following a particularly noxious “killer” fog in 1898, Parliament was pressured to enact legislation that regulated industrial emissions to protect the public health. Although the author reports that there were several “last gasps,” London’s fogs lessened throughout the 20th century as increasingly stringent environmental regulations were put into place.

For Corton, the London fog of the collective imagination became an important part of the culture of the Victorian era, reaching its height in the 1880s and 90s when the fog itself became most dire. London Fog: The Biography successfully captures the enormous impact this atmospheric had on a major city’s everyday life. Ironically, the result is a portrait that is both well-defined and sharply delineated.

Amy Henderson is a cultural critic and historian emerita of the National Portrait Gallery.